In recent years, the advances of the information technology greatly influence people's works, interactions in the community, and even life styles. In addition, hardware devices such as wireless sensor, tablet computer, smart phone, digital camera, and various computer equipment, are popular over the world. With the advances of the wireless communication technology and the info nation technology, various kinds of internet technologies are also being developed, wherein the technologies of M2M (Machine to Machine), IOT (Internet of Things), or DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) may make people feel more convenient and enjoyable when using the information technology. Therefore, wearable devices managing physical conditions and digital home technologies managing and sensing houses become main stream.
In the current digital convergence technologies, service providers or device manufactures may provide specific applications (for example, home security, health care, etc.) corresponding to their products, while a user executes a specific application on a specific gateway in a specific condition. FIG. 1A shows a schematic diagram of a digital convergence system 100. Referring to FIG. 1A, the system 100 includes three main parts: devices, gateways, and applications (APPs). Take an example, the devices 101-106 may include kinds of home devices in a digital home environment (for example, smart appliances, sensors, etc.), personal portable devices, or wearable devices (for example, smart glasses, watches, etc.). The gateways (for example, home gateway or mobile gateway) may be configured to connect to or communicate with the devices (for example, the home devices and the wearable devices as mentioned above) in a same networks to use the functions of the devices to execute different applications. For example, the devices 101-104 may obtain different applications via a home gateway 110, while the devices 105-106 may obtain different applications via a mobile gateway 120. The applications (APPs) 132-138 may be specific applications, which may be executed by specific devices, or provided by service providers or device manufactures. The APPs 132-138 may be configured to manage a plurality of devices (for example, devices 101-106), interact with environments, and obtain data of relative operating environments. The data may also be transmitted to service providers 142-148 in the clouds via the APPs 132-138.
In this architecture, all of the service providers or the device manufactures may provide specific applications (for example, home security, health care, etc.) corresponding to the products (for example, services or devices) of the service providers or the device manufactures. A user may execute a specific application in a specific gateway under a specific condition or situation. However, it is difficult to control and manage the applications and/or the devices when the number of the devices and the applications are increased. In the following, several examples are used to explain this kind of situation. In one example, assume that an old person is not at home, and the old person wears a heart rate measuring device connecting a cell phone to execute a nursing service application. In addition, a home set-top box (STB) connects an internet protocol camera (IP CAM) to execute a security service application. The following situations may occur. (1) Security service: When the old person come back home, the security service application needs to be closed to avoid triggering the alarm. When the old person leaves home, the security service application needs to be opened to detect the situations inside the house. It is inconvenient for each family member to do these actions. (2) Nursing service: When the old person come back home, the execution of the nursing service application may be transferred from the cell phone to the home STB, and the devices connected to the home STB may also be used. In this way, the connection cost and the power consumption of the cell phone may be saved. When the old person leaves home, the execution of the nursing service application should be transferred to the cell phone because there is no connection between the heart rate measuring device and the home STB. Whenever the old person leaves and come back home, the old person needs to open and close two applications on two gateways, which is very inconvenient to the old person.
In another example, when a person visits a public exhibition center (e.g. a museum), there is no information in the cell phone of the person to know that an available guiding service (e.g. multimedia guide) application may be executed. Therefore, the person requires to establish a connection between the cell phone and the gateway of the public exhibition center manually and download guiding applications for different areas according to different conditions.
The context awareness technique is widely used in digital convergence. By using the context awareness technique, the information needed by a user may be transmitted to a location where the user may use the information, according to different geography or environments. According to factors of the situations, proper information may be provided via a sensor. The context awareness technique may be implemented under a wireless network environment. FIG. 1B is a schematic diagram of using a home gateway 110 to describe managing all devices on the home gateway 110 according to various conditions. The devices 101-103 provide suitable information via a context aware service application 112 of the home gateway 110, and obtain different service applications from different servers 150 via a service provider 142 in the cloud. Different service applications may be provided according to different environmental conditions. However, each of specific service applications is provided by each of the different manufactures.
When the number of the devices and applications increases, it become difficult to manage and control well. Therefore, it is needed to provide a method to consider the cooperation and the communication between gateways to improve the execution benefit and lower the costs, so as to achieve demands of the digital home automation.